The CONVEX Liner Add-On to the DIAMOND-FORTUNE event
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA (United States)
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM (United States)
This report describes the execution of the CONVEX Liner Add-On to the DIAMOND FORTUNE low-yield cavity test of the Defense Nuclear Agency. CONVEX stands for COntained Nuclear Vessel EXperiment. It concerns the design of underground chambers where repeated low-yield nuclear explosions could be conducted. The approach proposed by the first author in the early 1980`s was to engineer a steel-lined rock cavern where the steel liner would be prestressed against the rock by tendons and/or bolts. These would daylight in tunnels surrounding the main cavity. From there, they could be initially tensioned and retensioned, if needed, after each test. The CONVEX Liner Add-On to DIAMOND FORTUNE consisted of anchoring a 1.4-m square, 2.5-cm thick steel plate to the wall of the cavity, using a 5-cm diameter center bolt, and four 2.5-cm diameter comer bolts. The bolts daylighted in a drift surrounding the gallery, and separated from it by a 9-m thick rock pillar. The liner plate, the bolts, and the rock pillar were equipped with 23 gages to describe the thermal and mechanical response of the system during pretensioning, during the dynamic loading phase, and post-test. Particular emphasis was given to obtaining the response both upon loading and during the rebound of the system, in order to determine whether the plate ever separated from the rock. So, the main operational objectives of this project were to acquire response data of the system under nuclear loading and to ascertain the status of contact between the steel plate and the rock, as shown by toadstool data and bolt tension data. The instrumentation and data acquisition system performed extremely well. Data were recorded during the dynamic phase; plate temperature was monitored for several hours after the test; and the remaining tension was obtained for several bolts more than three months after the test, upon re-entry in the runaround drift.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 10110700
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-ID-115510; ON: DE94004326
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 15 Nov 1993
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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